Biography | Javid Abdelmoneim — The Ebola Centre in Kailahun That Went on Panorama

In June 2014 Abdelmoneim left for Kailahun, the eastern Sierra Leone district that sits in the Kissi triangle with Guinea and Liberia.

MSF Operational Centre Brussels opened an Ebola management centre in Kailahun town on 26 June 2014. For months it was the only Ebola centre in the district.

He worked in the high-risk wards as an emergency doctor while the outbreak was still outrunning the response.

BBC Panorama filmed that tour. The resulting programme, Ebola Frontline, was later shortlisted for a BAFTA, an Emmy, and a Grierson.

The centre itself was a temporary camp of isolation wards, chlorine points, and an incineration pit, not a permanent civic hospital.

What a visitor finds in Kailahun today is the town and the government hospital, not the 2014 tents.

Over 33 weeks MSF recorded 1,219 suspected admissions here, of which 859 tested positive.

Those figures come from MSF's later assessment of the Kailahun response, not from a press line written in the first week.

The pin is the district capital where that centre stood. The original EMC is gone.

The photograph is Kailahun Government Hospital, a public-domain record of the civic hospital in the same town, reopened after civil-war damage. It is not a picture of the MSF tents.

Photo: Kailahun Government Hospital, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons